“Beep, beep, beep, BEEP!”
X-TRM-N-8 lurched suddenly forwards. Lights flickered back on. Flaps opened in the robot’s sides as it began furiously unpacking weapons as though making up for lost time. It shook angrily, bristling with enough firepower to make the supreme commander of a small martian outpost blush.
And then loosed the lot.
Paul was sharp enough to throw himself flat as a blanket spread of flash bombs beat against the sky’s anvil, sonically compressing everything ground-locked enough to be caught beneath it. Anything that wasn’t already broken, broke. Snow exploded into puffy white clouds. Concrete slabs splintered through. Metal screamed, bent, snapped. Glass flew like faeries reprogrammed to kill. Vaultwarriors on both sides covered ears, tympana, and waveceptors, and writhed on the ground. Wild loops of scattergun-fire shredded a skeletimp and chased the other from the sky. Ribongun corkscrewed through blistering swathes of gunfire before crashing into a wall. The hyper-dense, impossibly black beam of a back-mounted gravicannon hit the Widow herself. The forced singularity rippled through her before demolishing the parking garage behind her.
It collapsed into a supermassive gravitic well and a tsunami of dust.
Paul looked up from the ground and gawped.
Ralleigh looked mildly irritated.
Then it rained missiles.
Paul buried his face under his hands as the world turned to fire. He stayed where he was for the longest time, not daring to move. Repeated explosions made the ground shake. He gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, waited it out.
And after the longest half minute ever recorded, it stopped.
A robotic voice, some distance away, gave an immensely satisfied “Beep.”
Paul lifted his face.
The movement was painful. The backs of his neck and arms had been burned. Flecks of gray dust fell lazily out of the sky instead of snow. Pockets of fire guttered where craters and the fall of assorted debris sheltered them from the cold and the wind. He coughed, atomized metals grating up and down his throat. His E-RAYzer lay in the half-melted slush where he’d dropped it. With one peeled and blistered hand, he reached gingerly out to take it.
A weapon clicked. He froze. There was a hum, pitch and volume increasing – the distinctive whine of a ray weapon dialing through the settings from stun to kill to disintegrate.
“Well, well, well…” came the sibilant reptilian voice behind the weapon. “Raymon D’arco. We meet on the field again at last.”
Paul looked over his shoulder.
Arbitrator Taurex Vor held his neutralization ray at a spot between his shoulder blades. It was a Sanctum-blessed piece, white metal, stamped in emblems of peace and love. His long white Arbitrator’s cloak rippled in the wind, citation laurels and gold leaf fleur-de-lis glittering. Frost crusted his blue-green scales, turning them almost white. Steam billowed from Paul’s mouth, and he noticed that Taurex’s breath, by comparison, was clear. Slowly, so as not to provoke, he turned onto his back. Taurex’s aim followed him. Albeit sluggishly.
Paul’s lips crept into a grin as his doubts and fears evaporated.
This wasn’t a game any more.
It was better than that.
It was everything he had ever dreamed of having in life.
He was Raymon D’arco.
“Surrender, D’arco,” said Taurex, ice splintering off his jaw. It was the cold. The carnisaur was struggling in the cold. He couldn’t even shiver. “There’s no rule that says these battles have to be to the death.” Taurex shrugged. “I am a man of peace, after all.”
“Never,” said Raymon, and threw himself to one side.
Taurex fired, but the cold had left the saurian’s reactions a fraction too slow. The neutralizer zapped the ground where he’d been lying. Knees under, he drove upwards and drew his combat weapon: a curved cutlass with a quantum-thickness dark matter edge. Too sluggish to do the same, Taurex parried with his bracer. The dark-matter blade struck sparks from the metal, and brought a tympanic jiggle from a low-level defensive field.
For a split second Raymon felt dizzy, one mind trying to inhabit two people, in two places, and in two times at once.
It was so perfect.
He could almost forget he wasn’t fighting the real Taurex Vor.
The saurian turned his body with his parry, coat billowing, closing off avenues of attack as he whipped his white-bladed sword from its scabbard and countered.
Raymon deflected the thrust. Riposted with a rising slash from the left. Taurex skipped back, footwork drawing tracks through ash and snow, delivered a flurry of intricate blade-work that sent Raymon reeling back. He didn’t press. The saurian backed towards the burning wreck of a hovercar. The heat loosened reptilian muscles. He lowered his guard and beckoned. Raymon grunted and charged, leapt the final half-dozen feet and brought his blade crashing into Taurex’s. They spun apart, clashed together. Metal rang off metal. Exotic particles flew. Arbitrator greatcoats and flamboyantly sleeved doublets rippled with their increasingly energized blade-work and the hot breath of the fire.
The stirrings of a strange feeling began in Raymon’s chest.
Taurex whirled back. He was almost glowing.
Raymon stepped after him, crisscrossing himself with short, threshing strokes of his cutlass. Rather than retreat, Taurex stepped in. The saurian’s blade nipped along the flat of Raymon’s. Then he caught Raymon’s wrist and twisted, the cutlass popping from the stormkin’s grip.
The knot in Raymon’s heart became a spreading tightness as Taurex kicked him in the chest.
His armor was a soft fabric oversleeve to his waistcoat, designed to deflect ray blasts and beams. He felt it tear under the saurian’s boot heel as he flew back to the ground.
The feeling was an emotional implosion, focused underneath his ribs.
Arbitrator Taurex stood over him.
His sword tip kissed Raymon’s throat.
“I was always better than you.”
Raymon bared his teeth defiantly. “And yet I never lost a battle.”
At that moment, it didn’t matter if he genuinely lived or died. He’d been party to something incredible. He had seen a real Archon, two of them, in battle. In the same moment it dawned on him that the Battle of Gregson’s Lot had never been abandoned at all. Ralleigh and Thrurm were Archons, and so what was a hiatus of 1,021 years in order to wait for just the right set of conditions to unlock the vault? The sizzling of warmth and pleasure spread from his torso, into his limbs. He had fought as Raymon D’arco in a vault battle. And not just any vault battle. The longest recorded vault battle of all time! It made the famous month-long Echo vault battle between Uriel the Crimson and Maxcorra look like a one-punch knockout. He had lived his dream, had been, for a few precious minutes, part of an event and a time that, although he had never personally experienced it, he had loved enough to color every decision he had made in his adult life.
His heart opened like a phyll pod, and a golden wave of nostalgia flooded him.
Suddenly, a vision of Archon Thrurm appeared before him.
The key in his grip exploded with power. Paul could feel his emotion exerting on the raw æmber, forging it to fill the shape of a lock that only an Archon could see.
“No!” Taurex cried, withdrawing his blade from Paul’s neck and recoiling from the blazing Archon. “No, no, no! I was winning!”
Ralleigh hung her head, her brilliance fading from the field, leaving her followers confused and bereft as to what had just happened. Thrurm, however, burned with a radiance that outshone even æmber. There could be no doubt who had just been victorious. The Archon raised his key high, gigantic now, and inhuman, encased in metal plate armor with golden rivets.
Haloed in triumphant light.
A stunned silence lay over the bar, teetering on the back of something precious that no one who had briefly been permitted to touch it could quite describe or define. Paul breathed out, as though he’d been holding it in since the battle. Ribongun ble
w an unspoken agreement between their lips. Smiles clutched its kettle bottom, dashboard glowing contentedly. None of them spoke for a while. What was there to say after something like that?
“What do we do now?” Mica murmured. The sylicate had a dollop of Heal-X cement smeared across her shoulder, but she otherwise appeared none the worse for her ordeal.
“I can’t wait to see the next issue of Vaultheads,” said Ribongun.
Paul had never heard the martian speak so measuredly.
He thought back to the moment when the vault had opened. Light had spilled from the Archon just as it did in the holo-flashes. It had arisen from the Crucible itself, as if the ground and the air, and even Paul, had become æmber. He’d devoured so many stories of the legendary rewards of the vault. Some were said to shower triumphant vaultwarriors with gold or gemstones, rare metals or exotic plastics, weapons of the Architects or blueprints to the next great scientific marvel of the age. Paul had experienced nothing like that. Either Thrurm was keeping the vault’s riches to himself, which he doubted, because what use did an Archon have for such trinkets, or the reward for his part in the victory had been something altogether different. Something more priceless and ephemeral by far. An enormous sense of satisfaction and pride had filled him, and it was a feeling that had remained with him even as he had stumbled, blinking, from the light. Nothing would ever be able to take it away from him, although the glow had already dimmed somewhat, leaving behind a sense of absence, and worry at how far that core of wellbeing might eventually diminish in time.
It left him wanting more.
“Do we just… go back to our lives?” Mica went on. “After that?”
Paul looked up as the door opened.
Tomar walked in.
Or Thrurm he should probably say, but could not, even in his own head. He wore Tomar’s familiarly rumpled body and heroically mismatched attire. Paul’s stool scraped on the floor as he stood. Ribongun jumped back off theirs. Mica looked up, her settled body creaking.
“Beep,” said Smiles, sagely, and Paul had never heard something so heartbreakingly profound, so succinctly put.
He threw a stormkin salute as though he had been waiting his entire life for it.
There was so much he wanted to say to the Archon, to thank him for. There was so much he wanted to be able to ask.
He knew he would never get the chance.
“Wow,” said Thrurm, stuffing his hands in his jacket pockets and looking around. A single fzoont polished a glass about a foot off the ground behind the bar. He turned to Paul. “This place is so dead. I was just heading out to Brighthaven.” He gestured equivocally towards the door. “If anyone here wants to join me…”
Return to the
Crucible and
KeyForge soon!
Contributors
DAVID GUYMER is a scientist and writer from England. His work includes many novels in the New York Times-bestselling Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 universes, notably Headtaker and Gotrek & Felix: Slayer, and the bestselling audio drama Realmslayer. He has also contributed to fantastical worlds in video games, tabletop RPGs, and board games.
bobinwood.wixsite.com/thirteenthbell
twitter.com/warlordguymer
M K HUTCHINS is the author of the YA fantasy novels The Redwood Palace, and Junior Library Guild Selection, Drift. She is a prolific short story writer, appearing in Fireside, Podcastle, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. A long-time Idahoan, she now lives in Utah with her husband and four children.
mkhutchins.com
twitter.com/mkhutchins
CATH LAURIA is a Colorado girl who loves snow and sunshine. She is a prolific author of science fiction, fantasy, suspense and romance fiction, and has a vast collection of beautiful edged weapons.
twitter.com/author_cariz
ROBBIE MacNIVEN is a Highlands-native History graduate from the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of several novels and many short stories for the New York Times-bestselling Warhammer 40,000 Age of Sigmar universe, and the narrative for HiRez Studio’s Smite Blitz RPG. Outside of writing his hobbies include historical re-enacting and making eight-hour round trips every second weekend to watch Rangers FC.
robbiemacniven.wordpress.com
twitter.com/robbiemacniven
TRISTAN PALMGREN is the author of the critically acclaimed genre-warping blend of historical fiction and space opera novel Quietus, and its sequel Terminus. They live with their partner in Columbia, Missouri.
tristanpalmgren.com
twitter.com/tristanpalmgren
THOMAS PARROTT lives in middle Georgia, US, with his wife and three cats. He is the author of several short stories and an upcoming novel set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.
twitter.com/parrotttd
M DARUSHA WEHM is the Nebula Award-nominated and Sir Julius Vogel Award-winning author of the interactive fiction game The Martian Job, several SF novels, and the Andersson Dexter cyberpunk detective series. They have also written the Devi Jones: Locker YA series, and the coming-of-age novel The Home for Wayward Parrots. Originally from Canada, Darusha lives in New Zealand after spending several years sailing the Pacific.
darusha.ca
twitter.com/darusha
C L WERNER is a voracious reader and prolific author from Phoenix, Arizona. His many novels and short stories span the genres of fantasy and horror, and he has written for Warhammer’s Age of Sigmar and Old World, Warhammer 40,000, Warmachine’s Iron Kingdoms, and Mantic’s Kings of War.
CHARLOTTE LLEWELYN-WELLS is a bibliophile who took a wrong turn in the wardrobe and ended up as an editor – luckily it was the best choice she ever made. She’s a geek and fangirl with an addiction to unicorns, ice hockey and ice cream.
twitter.com/lottiellw
First published by Aconyte Books in 2020
ISBN 978 1 83908 023 4
Ebook ISBN 978 1 83908 024 1
Copyright © 2020 Fantasy Flight Games
All rights reserved. Aconyte and the Aconyte icon are registered trademarks of Asmodee Group SA. KeyForge and the FFG logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Fantasy Flight Games.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Cover art by David Kegg
Distributed in North America by Simon & Schuster Inc, New York, USA
ACONYTE BOOKS
An imprint of Asmodee Entertainment Ltd
Mercury House, Shipstones Business Centre
North Gate, Nottingham NG7 7FN, UK
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Table of Contents
Cover
Welcome to the Crucible
Title Page
Contract
The Apprentice
Extermination Examination
The Librarian’s Duel
To Catch A Thief
Useful Parasites
The Perfect Organism
Wibble And Pplimz,
Investigators For Hire
Vaultheads
Contributors
The World of KeyForge
Coming Soon: Arkham Horror
Coming Soon: Legend of the Five Rings
Join the Aconyte Newsletter
Copyright
Tales From the Crucible Page 27
